Sect Year 1 · fourth month · night of day 10 · the seventh life: Ghadir Wells, his thirty-first year
Ustam Renn’s tent stood among the salt-pans at the edge of the town. There, the old lake had dried to a white crust. It was a striped pavilion with its side-flaps tied up against the glare. Inside it was dim and cool and smelled of camel-wool and salt water. A brass lamp hung from the central pole, and a rug with a faded red border covered the ground, worn pale where a man’s feet had gone back and forth for years. Haddu knelt at the edge of the rug. Shuyi’s ledger lay open on it between them, its pages weighted at the corners with two clay cups and a stone of salt.
He read each line aloud. He didn’t hurry. The price of the two camels. The coin owed on the flood, the price of the cloth, the wedding-chest’s value and the coast run’s share. He read the interest, and then he read the sentence that said he had refused to add it.
He had rehearsed the reading all the way from the upper well, under his breath, the way he had once rehearsed the price of camels for the wagon drivers. The words had sounded right in the open air. Inside the tent they belonged to someone else.
